There are word nerds, and then there’s the woman who set up a folding chair on sidewalks throughout the country, cheerfully dispensing tips about grammar. She recounts her adventures in a new book. And the story of the brilliant pioneer of...
An industrial-design student in Savannah, Georgia, uses Boolean software for making 3-D renderings. Why Boolean ? The term honors the brilliant autodidact George Boole, who helped pioneer the use of binary computing language and Boolean logic. This...
Aeneas in Las Cruces, New Mexico, describes his family’s traditional way of razzing someone who just had a haircut. They shout Rinctums! (also spelled Rinktums!), and proceed to give the person a rough knuckle-rubbing on the back of their...
You know that Yogi Berra quote about how Nobody ever comes here; it’s too crowded? Actually, the first person to use this was actress Suzanne Ridgeway, who appeared in several movies with The Three Stooges. A new book shows that many well...
Why do we say we are going to nuke some food when we’re simply heating it in the microwave? The earliest recorded instance of nuking food in this way comes from a 1982 article in the University of North Carolina student newspaper. It’s...
We take our voices for granted, but it’s truly miraculous that we communicate complex thoughts simply by moving our mouths while exhaling. A fascinating new book reveals the science, history, and linguistics involved in human speech. And...